Publishing Initiatives at the Emory Center for
INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDS
Digital scholarship cannot be undertaken lightly. In her article “No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in the Library,” Posner argues that digital scholarship requires substantial institutional support in order to be successful. “We do not acknowledge often enough,” writes Posner, “that if a library is to engage in digital humani-ties activity, its leaders need to give serious thought to the administrative and technical infrastructure that supports this work.”26 Drawing on Trevor Muñoz’s scholarship, Posner notes that librarians (and, indeed, engineers, metadata specialists, and all others who are part of these projects) provide
intellectual labor to digital scholarship, and their job responsibilities should reflect this work. Thus, Posner offers, “many of the problems we have faced
‘supporting’ digital humanities may stem from the fact that digital humani-ties projects in general do not need supporters—they need collaborators.”27 A collaborative relationship requires commitment, especially from institutions.
In forming the advisory and editorial boards for Atlanta Studies, for example, we encountered anxiety over long-term support for the project.
Understandably, our collaborators wanted to know that the project had the necessary infrastructure for longevity. ECDS was able to provide technical support and dedicate staff time to the project. Without this commitment, it would have been difficult to launch the publication. As is often the case for editorial work, Atlanta Studies’ board members generally do not receive much professional credit for their labor; journal editing often carries very little weight in the all-important tenure and promotion standards. The cen-ter knew that we would need to provide macen-terial support and labor to make the project successful. In the case of Atlanta Studies, this support included paid staff time to design the site, lay out and copyedit pieces, and provide editorial guidance.
Flexible infrastructure, Posner continues, is a key component of a suc-cessful digital humanities project in the library.28 In its position between library and IT services, ECDS is able to draw on the resources of both when necessary. OpenTourBuilder, for example, required the ECDS proj-ect manager to work closely with the library software engineers and front-end designer. This work included technical components—making sure the application could support multiple kinds of media—but also content considerations. Because the app was designed for public audiences, it was important for the text to be legible and easy to understand. Having open communication between different project stakeholders was crucial.
Likewise, ECDS staff must have access to the appropriate resources.
Posner notes that digital humanities projects often require resources from many different parts of an institution, including “time from a developer, time from a designer, time from a metadata specialist, time from a system administrator, project management expertise, server space, a commitment to host the project in the long term. . . .”29 These resources are crucial for many digital scholarship projects, and it is important for staff to be able to draw on them easily.
The ATLMaps project involved a tremendous amount of collabora-tion—and resources—across institutions. We had to ensure that geoservers at Georgia State and Emory were properly working, obtain SSL certificates for user account creation, craft a terms of service agreement with the help of our scholarly communications office, secure permissions for all the media used—to say nothing of writing the code for the application and designing the user interface. It was essential for the center to be able to communicate with the project’s stakeholders and obtain the support ATLMaps required with minimal red tape. Ultimately, these projects have required tremen-dous support in the form of staffing, resources for development, design, and hosting, and institutional encouragement of library publishing activities.
CONCLUSION
ECDS has embraced library publishing, an emerging subfield that places the library at the center of intellectual output. We believe that the library can be the incubator and generator of scholarship, not just the archive or final destination. By taking a broad view of publishing, the center is able to provide a home for publishing projects that might not be supported in other venues.
In particular, ECDS is interested in supporting work that is public-facing. ATLMaps, OpenTourBuilder, Atlanta Studies, and the Atlanta Explorer projects are all examples of initiatives that want to engage publics outside the academy, in addition to providing resources for scholars. These projects also take existing Emory resources—digitized maps, images, and data sets—and make them publicly available. The center’s commitment to open-access publication and open-source software are not only part of this bent toward public scholarship, but are part of ECDS’s sustainability plan.
By sharing resources with other institutions and developers, the center is able to cultivate collaboration and garner support for its projects.
The center has learned many lessons from its own development and the work of other digital scholarship centers. Digital projects require an incredible amount of institutional support. Beyond the staff time and money required for this work, a center must be able to draw on resources across the library (and often across institutions) in a timely manner. Staff working on these projects must also have access to the help they need quickly and without having to wade through layers of bureaucracy.
We have not always been successful in our endeavors. As Posner notes, doing digital scholarship cannot be “business as usual” in a library. To be successful, she writes, “a library must do a great deal more than add ‘digital scholarship’ to an individual librarian’s long string of subject specialties. It must provide room, support, and funding for library professionals to exper-iment (and maybe fail).”30 Indeed, the center has seen projects flounder, fizzle, or fail to launch. And despite generous support from Emory, fund-ing can still be a challenge. The Atlanta Explorer project, for example, will likely require external funding to build three-dimensional models of the entire cityscape of 1930s Atlanta. Providing long-term preservation plans for our projects can also be difficult. As anyone who has worked in the field of data curation knows, preserving something as seemingly straightforward as a web page raises a number of questions. (Even once-ubiquitous web technologies like Flash are no longer supported!) These are real challenges for digital publishing projects, but we have found that being part of com-munities like the Library Publishing Coalition connects us with others who are working on these same problems.
Despite these challenges, ECDS continues to develop its publishing program with these lessons learned in mind. At present, we have projects under way that will expand our efforts to include open monographs, open educational resources, and other formats of digital publishing. We continue to build relationships with other institutions and look forward to future collaborations.
NOTES
1 “About the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship,” Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, http://digitalscholarship.emory.edu/about/index.html.
2 ECDS considers student training to be a crucial part of its work. In addition to employing graduate students, the center runs workshops and a semester-long series aimed at equipping students with digital scholarship skills.
3 Katherine Skinner, Sarah Lippincott, Julie Speer, and Tyler Walters, “Library-as-Publisher: Capacity Building for the Library Publishing Subfield,” Journal of Elec-tronic Publishing 17, No. 2 (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0017.207.
4 “Home,” Library Publishing Coalition, www.librarypublishing.org.
5 James L. Mullins, Catherine Murray-Rust, Joyce Ogburn, Raym Crow, Octo-ber Ivins, Allyson Mower, Daureen Nesdill, Mark Newton, Julie Speer, and
Charles Watkinson, Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success:
Final Research Report (Washington, DC: SPARC, 2012): 6.
6 Sarah K. Lippincott and Katherine Skinner, introduction to Library Publish-ing Directory 2015, ed. Sarah Lippincott (Atlanta, GA: Library PublishPublish-ing Coalition, 2015): vii.
7 Jennifer Vinopal and Monica McCormick, “Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability,” Journal of Library Administration 53, No. 1 (2013): 34.
8 Dr. Allen Tullos, the journal’s senior editor, also serves as ECDS’s codirector.
9 Lippincott, Skinner, and Watkinson, introduction to Library Publishing Directory 2014, xi.
10 “Home,” Southern Spaces, http://southernspaces.org.
11 Allen Tullos, “‘Needless to Say’: Articulating Digital Publishing Practices as Strategies of Cultural Empowerment” (paper presented at the annual Digital Humanities conference, Lausanne, Switzerland, July 7–12, 2014).
12 Stanford’s Jack Reed, formerly of Georgia State University, developed the pro-totype with colleagues at GSU. In the fall of 2014, the project moved to Emory for active development.
13 “About,” ATLMaps, http://atlmaps.com/#/about.
14 “emory-libraries-ecds/ATLMaps-Server,” GitHub (2015), https://github.com /emory-libraries-ecds/ATLMaps-Server.
15 “About,” The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory University, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/emorycoldcases/about.
16 “emory-libraries-ecds/OpenTourBuilder-Server,” GitHub.
17 Ibid.
18 “The Battle of Atlanta Tour App,” Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, http://
digitalscholarship.emory.edu/projects/project-digital-atlanta-mapping -battle.html.
19 Daniel A. Pollock, “The Battle of Atlanta: History and Remembrance,”
Southern Spaces (May 30, 2014), http://southernspaces.org/2014/battle -atlanta-history-and-remembrance.
20 “Readux Digitized Repository Now Live,” FYI: Robert W. Woodruff Library (August 13, 2014), https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/woodruff/fyi /readux-digitization-repository-now-live.
21 “emory-librarys/readux,” GitHub, https://github.com/emory-libraries/readux.
22 The year 1928 provides a good snapshot of Atlanta development for several decades. Much city development halted during the Great Depression. Like-wise, many building materials were requisitioned during World War II.
23 “Historic Map Collection,” MARBL, www.digitalgallery.emory.edu/luna/servlet /EMORYUL~3~3.
24 Michael Page, “Atlanta Explorer 1930” (presentation at Southern American Studies Association, Atlanta, GA, February 19–21, 2015).
25 “Atlanta Studies Network,” Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, http://
digitalscholarship.emory.edu/projects/project-digital-atlanta-studies.html
#atl_explorer.
26 Miriam Posner, “No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in the Library,” Journal of Library Administration 53, No. 1 (2013): 44.
27 Ibid., 45.
28 Ibid., 47–48.
29 Ibid., 47.
30 Ibid., 51.
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